It happens all the time. People invest a ton of money into starting a business they believe in. They build a website, establish an online presence, and do keyword research. They invest in analytical tools and create content to post on their website, only to find out they are not getting the intended results. They may have even hired professionals to help them but they are not getting the traffic they should have. It is probably because they have spent the majority of their advertising budget marketing to the wrong people.

All the most successful businesses spend a lot of time and money, in the beginning, researching their audience. You’ve got to know exactly who your audience is and what type of material they are receptive to before you will have any success marketing to them. The traditional marketing methods that work on millennials won’t work on baby boomers. So, how do you avoid wasting your marketing dollars on a strategy that won’t reach the customers you want? Here are a few tips for successful targeted marketing in the current digital economy.

Make Sure You Understand The Human Behavior Behind Needs And Wants

A basic human need is something that is instrumental in survival. For instance, we all need to drink water to survive. A want is something that makes our lives easier, like a vehicle, for example. It is not necessary for survival, but it certainly makes transportation easier. Too many companies try to focus on customer needs instead of wants. People make purchasing decisions based on their wants, not their needs. Take smoking, for instance. Someone you know needs to quit smoking, so they can live longer but they will probably still buy cigarettes because deep down inside they want to. The key is knowing exactly what problem your product or service solves and cater it to the wants of an audience.

Isolate And Identify Problems And Motives

If you’ve got a good company on your hands, then it probably solves some sort of issue. Your product or service makes life easier for people in some way, shape or form. You already know what your product or service is, but you need to dig deep and identify exactly what problem it will solve for the audience. Once you are able to drill down to how your product or service makes life easier for someone, then you will be able to identify the motivation. Why would it make life easier and why would they buy from you? These are basic exercises that should be done at the beginning of a marketing campaign when you are building personas to help you identify your target market.

Don’t Cast The Net Too Wide

Many companies make the mistake of targeting broad industries and keywords with fierce competition instead of solving a specific problem for a smaller niche. This is a big mistake, especially in the beginning. Focus on long-tail keyword phrases specific to a particular niche within an industry instead of trying to focus on an entire industry. A smaller targeted audience can be more beneficial and produce more revenue than a broad audience of maybe so’s. You can’t please everyone all the time and that is the problem you are faced with when you cast your net too wide. Instead, focus on solving a specific issue for a specialized niche and it will be much easier to isolate your target market.

Marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to new customers. However, you have to make sure that you are marketing to the right people. There is little to gain by marketing your bacon lover t-shirts to vegan dieters. Instead, you may want to focus your efforts to those who love to light up a grill every night. So, you have to make sure the platform that you are using helps you identify your demographic and market to them effectively. Wasting money is not a good idea, and marketing to the wrong crowd is like wasting money. Take the time to learn these tips so that you aren’t marketing to the wrong demographic and throwing away money in the process.

Jeff Shuford is a nationally syndicated columnist whose monthly column appears in more than 44 regional newspapers. Shuford is one of fewer than five millennial African-American syndicated columnists in the United States, and one of the country's youngest syndicated columnists overall.